Decolonial Politics: State, Statelessness, and Coexistence in Peace

ABSTRACT

Due to the colonial continuities encoded in postcolonial nation-states, formal decolonisation reproduced new dominations rather than peaceful intergroup coexistence. Reflecting on the ‘how’ of decolonial politics, I argue that self-determination beyond the nation-state and spatiotemporally embedded decolonial imaginations are the undecomposable components of decolonial politics. I exemplify the failures of the nation-state through Southern (Iraqi) Kurdistan and illustrate Western (Rojava-Syrian) Kurdistan as a possible example of stateless decolonial coexistence, despite major geopolitical and socio-historical stalemates. The argument contributes to peace studies in International Relations by rethinking inter-group coexistence at the intersection of violent geopolitics and decolonial imaginations.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonial politics
• coloniality
• nation-state
• statelessness
• coexistence in peace
• Kurdistan

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Marcos Scauso, two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, the editors of this special issue and the participants of EWIS panel titled ‘Peace in plural: Decolonial (and) feminist approaches to peace(-building)’, for their invaluable comments on the previous versions of this article at various stages.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jan Yasin Sunca

Jan Yasin Sunca obtained a joint Ph.D. degree from Bielefeld University (Germany) and Ghent University (Belgium). His work intersects international historical sociology, revolutionary politics, radical and decolonial political theory, and conflict analysis/transformation with a geographical focus on West Asia. He has published in the fields of revolutionary politics, nationalism and peace. Previously, he advised European institutions and NGOs on the relations between the EU, Turkey and the Kurds. Currently, he conducts a research project on statelessness and inter-subaltern hierarchies in a comparative context of Kurdistan, Chiapas, Western Sahara, and Tamil Eelam.